Remailer Statistics

Overview

At the time of writing this webpage, there are in the region of fifty active Anonymous Remailers. By next month, some will have ceased to be, others will have started and yet more will have changed their configurations. For the user to keep track of all these changes would be a time consuming and error prone task, and so many choose to take advantage of statistics gathered by other people. Some statistics providers (such as myself), take advantage of an application called Echolot written by Peter Palfrader that fully automates the collection of Remailer Statistics. This reduces the risk of human error and also provides a very accurate and readable representation of the current Remailer nodes and their configurations.

Remailer Statistics - Files

For those who have studied Remailer Statistics, you will have noticed that there are a number of different files to choose from and the names of them vary from one source to another. The files available can be put into two categories:

Remailer Statistics

Files that provide information into the current Remailer reliability and capabilities.

Remailer Keys

Files that contain Remailer public keys used for encryption purposes.

Both of these can be sub-categorised into the following types:

Cypherpunk

Cypherpunk (Otherwise known as Type I) was the first Remailer solution. It relies on PGP encryption, which is good for securing the content of the message, but has serious issues with regard to hiding where they came from. Cypherpunk is still alive as it provides some functionality that doesn't exist in Type II.

Mixmaster

Mixmaster (Otherwise known as Type II) is a later Remailer solution that was developed to overcome the shortfalls of Cypherpunk. It provides much better anonymity, but currently lacks functionality included within Cypherpunk for replies and anonymous recipients.

Statistics (not Keyrings) can be can be further sub-categorised into Version 1 and Version 2 files, (not to be confused with Type I and Type II). These are just two versions of displaying statistics files. Version 2 contains more information, but not all Remailer clients can use them.

The final point to consider is RSA vs DSA, which only applies to Cypherpunk. If you are using PGP v2.x, then it doesn't understand DSA type keys. If you are using anything later, then I would suggest using statistics that combine RSA and DSA keys so as to ensure you have the maximum number of Remailers available to you.